Keto Danish Butter Cookies (2024)

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A holiday classic gets a healthy makeover! Homemade Danish Butter Cookies now come in a low carb version. Beautiful swirls of tender keto butter cookie dough baked to crisp perfection. This post is sponsored by Bob’s Red Mill.

Remember those Danish butter cookies making the rounds every holiday season? You know the ones – they came in a pretty blue metal tin and the cookies were all nestled in fluted paper cups?

Every house had them, back in my childhood. It was like standard holiday issue in Toronto, you absolutely must have the tin of cookies. They were usually gifted by some aunt, grandmother, or coworker. They were tasty but often the tin lasted so long, they grew stale before you could eat them all.

Still, many of us seem to have fond memories of those cookies, because they were such a holiday staple.

More great Keto Holiday Cookies: Check out Keto Sugar Cookies, Keto Gingerbread Men, and Keto Spritz Cookies!

Danish Butter Cookies go keto!

Well, you no longer need to mourn those sweet holiday cookies of yore, because Keto Danish Butter Cookies have arrived! And they are just as buttery, tender, and sweet as the real thing. Possibly more so because they come guilt-free.

I can’t tell you how fun it was to tackle this classic cookie recipe. I actually had to tackle it a few times, as the first few batches simply didn’t live up to the butter cookies of my memory.

It’s a tricky thing to get right, a soft dough that you can pipe into pretty swirls, whilst also being firm enough to not completely dissolve during baking. All the more tricky with keto ingredients.

So I am sharing all of my keto butter cookie tips right here, right now!

How to make low carb butter cookies

This is an almond flour recipe, so of course I used my trusty Bob’s Red Mill. I find it to be the most consistent for my keto baked goods. I wouldn’t try to make this recipe with any other flour, as I think almond flour is ideal for that tender crisp texture.

Using a food processor will make the dough more cohesive and very well combined. I first tried just beating things together in my stand mixer but it didn’t produce as fine a dough and the resulting cookies had a slightly gritty texture. The food processor made a huge difference.

Make sure that butter is well softened. This is an important factor too. If your butter is too firm, the dough won’t be as cohesive and you will end up with little holes in your cookies were bits of butter have melted away. The ideal temperature for softening butter is 70F. If your house is a bit chilly, give the butter a slight zap in the microwave (10 seconds). Or do what I do and leave it right by your heating vent for a few minutes! Just don’t let it be completely melted.

Use a larger open star piping tip. The tip you use for piping these cookies is very important. I have any number of decorating tips but very few of them are open enough for pushing through the stiff dough into pretty swirls. I used the Ateco #828, which is quite large, but the slightly smaller #826 would work as well.

Hint: these both would also be good tips for the keto cheese straws recipe I have coming very soon!

Double baking helps crisp them up. Danish butter cookies should be quite crisp but you also want them a pale golden color. To avoid over-browning, I took mine out at about the 20 minute mark, but then I returned them to the warm oven for a bit to help them crisp up. Worked like a charm!

As always, your sweetener matters. The only way to achieve a truly crisp cookie is with erythritol based sweeteners such as Swerve. Other sweeteners like BochaSweet, allulose, etc, make for cake-y soft cookies. Not necessarily a bad thing but not the perfect Danish Butter Cookie consistency.

Dipping them in chocolate and using sugar-free sprinkles takes them to the next level! But you can always keep your butter cookies unadorned, like the original. Either way, they are delicious!